Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Wine, K800i, Ruby and Air Conditioning

Wine tasting very good idea, maybe not on a work night - it wasn't pretty today. However servers were having a day off too so I schlepped off to a quiet conference suite with air con where I could recover and do some work without interruptions, but mainly recover.

My extra cool two fingered right click has stopped playing, which is annoying on two levels, firstly when I first hacked the functionality thanks to the x86 project on my early release mbp I said it would take time to get used to using that rather than writhing for ctrl key now I've got used to it being there it is not working and I keep wanting to use it.

Milling about on my phone I found a method of changing the sort order of the address book to surname, much preferred. I do like the way AddressBook hooks in automatically to my phone if Bluetooth is on.

What would be very cool is if the MBP supported the Headset profile in BT and thus you could leave your handset in the briefcase and make and receive calls from the cell phone with aplomb. The echo cancelation has gotta be there for the iChat kit to work.

Given I couldn't write any server side script today I thought I'd flex my proper programming muscles by exercising my Java. Then I thought I might have a go at getting Ruby + Rails set up on the MBP.

I decided to watch a couple of conference videos, Who is this Dick on my website ? The new sxip CEO presentation for OSCON 2006. Very good, accurately described as a sequel to Dick Hardt's previous presentation on Identity 2.0. I loved his quip about Web 2.0Why do I watch conference videos instead of going, no real reason other than I doubt I could convince my employer to send me to the ones I want to go to, either proper academic ones or technical ones.1) We seem to enjoy being at the behest of M$ and thus whilst I'd like to embrace open source at the back end it isn't trusted or used so I can't go to say OSCON for example.2) I seem incapable of conveying why my attendance would have a net benefit to the establishment, which is entirely a failing of mine. Especially the $2000 Nielsen Norman Usability Week 2006 in San Francisco.

I aspire to go on one of these geek cruises I hear about, they are pretty expensive but I might consider saving up for the Mac Mania one this year since I have copious amounts of holidays I need to use and given my mood at work right now I'm probably most inclined (I really can't think of the correct word) to get away for a bit.